"The Land of Clouds" / new story

I'm very happy to have a story published in the current issue of The New Quarterly. It's set in Oaxaca in Mexico where I stayed for three weeks in 2017. 

Working on travel stories in this last year while we haven't been able to travel has helped keep me sane. It's my writerly version of taking a trip. 

You can read it here: https://tnq.ca/story/the-land-of-clouds/

 

dress / identity / social history

Remember the Beatles' song, Eleanor Rigby?

"Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice
In the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face
That she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twFbweJfUUo

It's a song about all the lonely people, but you know how your attention zooms in on a single line? Even as a teenager I was caught by the face kept in a jar by the door. What a resounding image for the identity we put on to go out into the world--how we wish people to see us--or how we disguise ourselves so people don't see us. An assumption of identity or a game of hide n' seek.

In 2015 I started doing research into historical clothing. I wasn't interested in dress styles so much as how clothing was styled to emphasize or hide the human figure. Breasts were sometimes crushed flat, sometimes revealed to almost the nipples. A Regency silhouette (early 1800s) defined the bust but wafted and floated around the waist, hips, and legs. This very formlessness was racy because it looked like the underclothing of previous centuries. There were no hoops, bum rolls, and drapery of fabric to disguise and deform the human anatomy, so that a woman looked like a ship moving through a room. And was hampered like a ship if it had to maneuver in a room.

Imagine wearing a "cage crinoline".

Of course, I'm referring to Eurocentric society. I am aware that other cultures dressed differently.

I stopped doing research into historical clothing when I realized that the book I was working on should be something else. I followed the something else, but I haven't forgotten the conservation labs of museums with their magnifying lamps, skeins of hair silk, experiments with droppers to match a fabric dyed 300 years earlier, fascinating stories about clothes--what you could see about the habits of the people who wore them, what you could discover about the society who made them. A dress made with imported fabric, for example, reveals information about trade routes.

In the Institute of Conservation in Vienna, a student was working on a dress that belonged to Maria Anna, the older sister of Marie Antoinette. The Marie Antoinette. I wasn't supposed to take pics but here (sorry!) I snuck an angle of the shoulder and a long piece of fabric that might have been a central panel of the skirt or a shawl or...? That's what the student and her professor were trying to figure out.

The panel was decorated with looped and knotted flowers made from silk thread and the slimmest of ribbons. In some areas they needed to be replaced, but so far the student had only succeeded in making a few. The original blooms must have been knotted by children's hands.

That interests me too: the labour involved in making clothes--harvesting fibre, spinning, dyeing, weaving. Before industrialization, much of that work was done by women and children. The manufacture of clothing is rich with social history.

This dress is historical in a different sense--and also a statement about identity. The artist, Rebecca Belmore, made it as a riposte to the absurdity of colonial values. A friend saw it in the AGO in Toronto and sent me a couple of pics, along with the artist's statement: "That summer [1986 or 87] the royal newlyweds, Prince Arthur and Sarah Ferguson, paid a royal visit to a reconstructed fur-trading fort at Old Fort William.... My contribution was Rising to the Occasion, a dress that was part Victorian ball gown and part beaver dam. The royals came to our city for a handful of hours as performers, replaying colonial history complete with birch bark canoes and a fake fort. This was incredibly absurd to me. What to wear for such an absurd occasion?"

I agree!

Dress as identity. Dress as it shapes us--whether it's imposed, we embrace it, or choose it as a disguise. Dress as a record of social history. I hope to write this book yet.  

what's in an old dress? visiting a textile conservation lab in Vienna

History books describe voyages, trade routes, architecture, wars.

I'm interested in the more modest register of clothes. Clothes show us how people from other times and places lived--as well as about voyages, war, and trade routes. After all, fabrics were brought from the Orient to Europe; lace from Belgium to Spain; bone buttons from Upper Canada to England. With each royal marriage between countries, new fashions were introduced at court, filtering down to the population.

This dress is on display at the McCord Museum in Montreal. Its date is 1882. From its style and the fabric, a textile conservator can make an educated guess as to where it came from and the social status of the woman who wore it. Sure, she had status. Look at the gorgeous embroidered trim and matching shell buttons. The buttons are machine-made, which make me wonder how they're made and where they came from.

And underneath the dress, what did the woman wear? There's always the ubiquitous chemise, some variation of which women wore next to their skin for centuries.

Bras as we know them, weren't worn until the 1900s. Before then, depending on the ideal silhouette of the time, breasts were either squished/half-supported with a corset, let hang, or engirdled. The medical debate about the necessity of strapping women into corsets to keep their innards in place is pretty funny. Yay for the good sense of the Rational Dress Society (1881) who opposed constricting corsets, unwieldy skirts, impossible heels. There's a history of feminism to be deduced from the changing line of the bodices of dresses.  

In textile conservation, clothes are called costumes. That was the first thing I learned as I began to do research. The next is that there is nothing as damaging to textiles as sunlight--or light in general. And moths. Moths can do worse damage, but you might not have moths, whereas light is pervasive.

Before I went to Austria this past fall, I wrote some letters and was granted permission to visit the textile laboratory of the Institute of Conservation in Vienna, where several students explained their projects to me.

I was a little hampered by not being able to take pictures. I was a little hampered because I persisted in trying to understand in German. I was a little hampered because some of what people used to wear simply didn't make sense.

One object was a hat that looked like a 1960s bouffant hairstyle created with emerald green feathers. Imagine it.

I assumed it was a woman's hat, but the student assured me it was for a man--in fact, for a military man. It was a ceremonial military hat worn in the early 1900s. She wasn't actually working on the feathers and the hat, which were in good condition, but the hat box. There had been a tear and she was dyeing swatches of canvas to try to match the colour to patch it. She had hotplates, scales, beakers, and pages of chemical equations to concoct the exact colour.

That evening, back at the hotel, still not understanding what this extravagantly green-feathered hat was supposed to look like, I did a search and found this photo of Kaiser Franz Josef. I suppose it's no more ridiculous than the guards' hats at Buckingham Palace.

I mention moths above. One of the objects being worked on was a 15th-century saint's cassock that had been kept in a monastery where it was observed to have moth holes. Conservation had to wait until the church granted permission to open the reliquary in which the robe was tightly rolled. That's what that large wax seal is: permission granted.
Many photos had to be taken--and will be taken yet. Many, many, many. Documentation before, during, every step of the way. So many photos that the robe wasn't even ready to be unrolled yet while I was there. However, I was there when the string was cut and the rolled cassock was very carefully lifted out.

Again, I had to wait to get back to the hotel that evening to see who this St. Joannis a Capistrano was: the patron saint of Hungary, as well as of soldiers and lawyers.
I don't know my saints, but the name nagged at me until I did more research and found out that there are Spanish mission houses in the US named after him too. We visited one when we were in Texas in 2008.

I attach no significance to the coincidence, but I'm always tickled when life throws one at me.

There were a few interesting objects under treatment in the textile lab. I took copious notes and am thinking of how I want to incorporate what I've learned in this next novel I'm working on. I'll probably only use a small fraction, but who knows where else the research might lead?

I wasn't supposed to take pics of the objects but here's one I must have snapped accidentally.

I shouldn't say what it is... but it belonged to a woman who was related to Marie Antoinette. The dress didn't interest me as much as the flower decorations along the longer piece. They're made of knotted threads. The conservation student was trying to make some herself but had so far only succeeding in tangling the knots. I'm thinking only a child's fingers could have done work that fine. A child living in the 1700s, crouched on a stool, having to work by candlelight.